Family tragedy plays out in CSC's 'Our American Hamlet'

WELLESLEY - Give me a good historical drama any day - I love it when a play grips us with great storytelling and teaches us something new.

Such a play is "Our American Hamlet," a new drama by Jake Broder now receiving its world premiere by Commonwealth Shakespeare Company at Babson College's Sorenson Center for the Arts. CommShakes, as they are nicknamed, are the same talented folks who entertain thousands with the free Shakespeare on the Common performances in Boston during the summer. But don't let the name "Shakespeare" scare you away from seeing this fascinating and truly American story performed by superb actors right here (No traffic! Free parking!) in MetroWest.

Poor Edwin Booth - he was once the most famous actor in America but is now remembered only as the older brother of infamous Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. Before his brother shot the president at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., the night of April 14, 1865, Edwin toured the world's important stages and was particularly known for his role as Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet. But all his life he was saddled by family troubles, including a hard-drinking father and, as we see, a brother consumed with jealousy who took offense at the smallest slights.

The sensational aspects of the assassination are almost incidental, coming near the end of "Our American Hamlet," which is inventively directed by CSC's founding artistic director Steven Maler. The play is a study of the family dynamics of this famed family of thespians and theorizes the family dysfunction may be responsible for why Edwin (played by Juilliard Drama grad and Houseman Prize winner Jacob Fishel) became a Union supporter while his brother (Joe Fria, seen recently in the horror movie "The Belko Experiment" and on TV's "Gilmore Girls") turned out to be a Confederate sympathizer and one of the nation's first "celebrity murderers."

We first learn the father, Junius Brutus Booth (Will Lyman, CSC's "King Lear" and longtime narrator of PBS' "Frontline"), was also a renowned tragedian - and a famous drinker - who took young Edwin on the road with him not only as his dresser, but also to guard him from the bottle, which turned out to be an impossible task. The father was a tortured man who had many problems, some perhaps psychological, including leaving his first wife and child in England and running off to America with Mary Ann Holmes, with whom he had 10 more children many of whom did not live to adulthood. This play, though, focuses on just four children, brothers Edwin, John Wilkes and June (Junius Jr.) and sister Asia.

Eerily, the play begins with a single "ghost light," an exposed incandescent bulb on a slim pole used as a safety device in a darkened theater. On walks ardent Edwin Booth admirer and narrator Adam Badeau (played by playwright Broder) who says he is "haunted" by Edwin Booth and says he tried to stop him from going back to the stage after the assassination, fearing he would be rejected. Suddenly the stage is more brightly illuminated and we see the set, designed by Julia Noulin-Merat with lighting by Brian Lillienthal, is spare but convincing: grass baskets and ropes hang from a wooden apparatus, giving the effect of being backstage. On a small wooden table is the skull from a famous scene in "Hamlet," the play Junius and later his son Edwin are known for.

Fishel does a wonderful job portraying a man who obviously loved the stage and tries to thread the needle to keep all the members of his family happy. We see Edwin become an actor and his career grow until he outshines his terrifying yet talented father.

We see John Wilkes Booth, before he was America's most famous assassin through the eyes of Badeau as a petty jealous man with little talent, and although the history books always mention that he was a stage actor, it's clear the narrator thinks little of him and the focus of this story is on the relationship between Edwin and his father.

Some actors play more than one role, marked by costume changes, including Lucy Davenport who plays both sister Asia and Edwin's first beloved wife Mary. Their mostly dark costumes, designed by veteran opera costume designer Nancy Leary, do a good job of making us feel like we are sitting in a theater in the mid-1800s. Maureen Keiller (the New Rep's "The Snow Queen"), plays both Mary Ann Holmes, Junius Brutus Booth's common law wife in America, and Adelaide Delanoy, the wife he left behind in England. Asia, who seems to be the only sensible person in the family, reluctantly marries theater owner John Sleeper Clarke (Kelby Akin, who also plays June Booth and a fight captain) to please her family. Although we know the outcome, the playwright has done a great job of building suspense, keeping our eyes glued to the stage. The multiple role-playing is a little bit confusing, but seems purposeful in that people, including members of his own family, may have been in some ways interchangeable to Junius Booth, who, like bad weather, had an effect on everyone around him.